The urbane director K.A. Abbas once referred to Khan Mehboob as the
"great rustic" of the Hindi cinema. Indeed, a certain
mythology developed around Mehboob—that of the man with popular
roots. This image owed much to stories about his origins (the small-town
boy who worked his way up through the Bombay studios), and to certain
films which dwelt on the travails of the poor and the destitute, such as
Aurat (Woman)
and
Roti (Bread).
In fact, however, Mehboob's output as director was quite varied.
After he founded his own company, Mehboob Productions, in 1943, he made
historical works
(Humayun)
and fantasy spectaculars
(Aan/Pride).
Even films such as
Anmol Ghadi (Priceless Watch)
and
Anokhi Ada (A Special Charm)
, which appeared to address the class divide, were variations of the
triangular love story, the favoured convention of the Hindi cinema.

In these films social representation becomes incidental to the basic plot
because the narrative spaces of a simple rural life or of urban
destitution are constructed in an idealised rather than in a realistic
way. The lighting style of such scenes show them as composed of smooth
studio surfaces, and there is an indifference to the more squalid details
of characterisation. The emphasis lies in the fullness of melodramatic
sentiments—of loss and of romantic longing—which occasion
the use of lushly orchestrated songs. All this is a pleasurable closing
off of the cinema and its audience from social references, a tendency in
Mehboob's work best represented by his venture into the
swashbuckling colour film
Aan.
Elements of this romantic mode are observable even in Mehboob's
"social" films. In
Aurat
and its
later colour version,
Mother India
, rural life is often conveyed as a series of spectacularly choreographed
scenes of harvesting, festivals, and the romantic engagement of its
characters.
Andaz (Style)
, on the other hand, invites the audience to soak in the luxuries of the
modern, upper-class settings in which its characters live.

In this sense, Mehboob was not simply a popularly rooted
"rustic" artist, but engaged in creations of high artifice
and escapism. However, these elements were often integrated with quite
powerful constructions of meaning.
Aurat
, for example, achieves an almost anthropological view of gender roles.
This is accomplished not by the accuracy of its observations about rural
life, but by using the grim struggles of rural life as a way of drawing
out the role performed by Indian women. This provides the basis for the
film's main interest, the melodrama of the unrelieved suffering of
a woman (Sardar Akhtar) on behalf of her sons (Surendra and Yakub). The
subsequent version of this film,
Mother India
, is an interesting contrast. The focus is still on the suffering of the
mother (Nargis); but this capacity to suffer is transformed into a
distinctly mythical power which moves beyond her immediate family to
inspire the whole village community. In both films the woman is the bearer
of a patriarchal inheritance for her son, but
Mother India
may have represented a new, mythicised role model for women, one whose
power often co-exists uneasily with its conservative functions.

Perhaps most interesting is
Andaz
, a drama, at least implicitly, of illicit desire. The story is about Nina
(Nargis) who, while faithful to her absent fiancé (Raj Kapoor),
relates vivaciously to an attractive young man (Dilip Kumar). The heroine
is shown to be a naive innocent who cannot perceive that relaxed social
relations between men and women can lead to misunderstanding, and this
generates the tragic events that follow. Yet the narration moves beyond,
or perhaps deeper into, its own fascination with the settings and mores of
its upper class characters, introducing an interesting, fantastical
ambiguity. Nina's denials that she is attracted to a man other than
her husband are put into doubt for the audience through scenes depicting
the hallucinations and dreams that assail the heroine. In this way the
"rustic" Mehboob was surprisingly well equipped to convey
certain strikingly modern problems of sexuality and desire.

—Ravi Vasudevan

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